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Salk News

La Jolla, CA – Ronald M. Evans, Ph.D., professor and head of the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, will receive the 2005 Grande Médaille D’Or (Grand Gold Medal), France’s highest scientific honor, for his research discovering how hormones and drugs control the body’s metabolism, development and reproduction.

La Jolla, CA – The cellular cascade of molecular signals that instructs cells with fatally damaged DNA to self-destruct pivots on the p53 tumor suppressor gene. If p53 is inactivated, as it is in over half of all human cancers, checks and balances on cell growth fail to operate, and body cells start to accumulate mutations, which ultimately may lead to cancer. Not surprisingly, the regulation of this vital safeguard has been studied in great detail for many years but mainly in tissue culture, or in vitro, models.

La Jolla, CA – Nature is a seemingly endless storehouse of interesting – and potentially life-saving – biological molecules. But tracking down and harvesting those chemicals in their natural form can be time-consuming, expensive and unreliable.

La Jolla, CA – Brains are marvels of diversity: no two look the same – not even those of otherwise identical twins. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found one explanation for the puzzling variety in brain organization and function: mobile elements, pieces of DNA that can jump from one place in the genome to another, randomly changing the genetic information in single brain cells. If enough of these jumps occur, they could allow individual brains to develop in distinctly different ways.

La Jolla, CA – Geoffrey M. Wahl, Ph.D., professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, recently was elected the 2006-07 president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the world’s oldest and largest professional organization dedicated to accelerating scientific progress to prevent and cure cancer.

La Jolla, CA – The mysterious, highly infectious prions, which cause the severe destruction of the brain that characterizes ‘mad cow disease’ and several human brain degenerative disorders, can be rendered harmless in the laboratory by a slight alternation of the three-dimensional conformation or shape of the prion protein’s structure.

La Jolla, CA – To ignite a life-threatening infection in the body, a virus such as HIV invades body cells by first merging, or fusing, with the cell’s outer membrane. Once inside the cell, the invading microbe’s genetic material takes over, turning the ‘host’ cell into a factory to produce more copies of the virus, which then spill out to invade other cells in the body.

La Jolla, CA – Humans and other animals may appear to be symmetrical on the outside, but symmetry is only skin deep. Many body organs, such as the stomach, the heart and the liver, are tipped to the right or left side. So how does the developing embryo distinguish left from right? Salk scientists have now discovered that the foundations for the basic left-right body plan are laid by a microscopic ‘pump’ on the outer surface of the embryo’s underside that wafts chemical messengers over to the left side of the body. This sets up a chemical concentration gradient that tells stem cells how and where to develop. The remarkable findings, including movie footage of the ‘pump,’ are published in the May 20th edition of the journal Cell.

La Jolla, CA – When primitive nerve cells begin forming an eye in the mouse embryo, they are programmed to build a retina. But the ability to see depends upon connecting the retina to the brain via the optic nerve. Unless these embryonic cells are given the right cue at the right time, they mistakenly form a huge eye that consists entirely of retina and lacks the optic nerve.

La Jolla, CA – In this week’s journal Nature, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies report that they have solved one of the ‘holy grail’ puzzles of developmental biology: the existence of a mechanism that insures that the exterior of our bodies is symmetrical while inner organs are arranged asymmetrically.

La Jolla, CA – Fred H. “Rusty” Gage, Ph.D., whose basic research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has advanced scientific understanding about the potential of the adult brain and nervous system to repair itself, has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinction awarded annually to top individuals in business, government, public affairs, the arts and popular culture as well as biomedical research.

La Jolla, CA – The ability of a pair of legs to walk in a stepwise fashion with each other appears to be set up during a brief period as an embryo’s spine develops, when a single neurotransmitter takes its turn to “talk” to nerve cells.

La Jolla, CA – During embryonic development, thousands of nerves must be connected to muscles as part of a communication network that allows the newborn to move, breathe and lead a normal life. The question is, how does this complicated ‘telephone system’ get wired up?

La Jolla, CA – On the morning of April 12, jhundreds of Salk scientists, graduate students and staff will begin their day at the Institute by celebrating the 50th anniversary of the vaccine that has saved them – and millions of others – from becoming crippled or dying from poliomyelitis or polio.

La Jolla, CA – The Salk Institute scientist who earlier discovered that enhancing the function of a single protein produced a mouse with an innate resistance to weight gain and the ability to run a mile without stopping, has found new evidence that this protein and a related protein play central roles in the body’s complex journey to obesity and offer a new and specific metabolic approach to the treatment of obesity related disease such as Syndrome X (insulin resistance, hyperlipidemia and atherosclerosis).

La Jolla, CA – Salk Institute for Biological Studies scientists have identified a tiny flexible gateway that controls the rapid-fire opening and closing of a family of ion channels through which potassium ions flow in and out of cells of the body.

La Jolla, CA – The elusive world of membrane proteins – the crucial gatekeepers of a body cell’s outer wall that are popular targets for scientists trying to understand the molecular origins of health and disease – has been made more accessible through a discovery published in the February 25 issue of Science.

La Jolla, CA – A hallmark of brain organization is that nerve cells (neurons) with similar function are grouped together. But Salk Institute for Biological Studies research published in Nature on February 24 shows that neighboring neurons also keep secrets that they share only with trusted friends.